Growing up on Nantucket in the era of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Sojourner Truth, Maria Mitchell prized intelligence and inquiry and was encouraged, as were other island girls, to study the stars. In 1847 she detected the comet that now bears her name, and became internationally famous in the scientific world. Science and the humanities were not seen as separate spheres in those days, notes former Fulbright scholar and Mitchell authority Renée Bergland, and fields like mathematics and astronomy were havens for educated women. This changed, however, and by the time Mitchell was teaching at Vassar, male scientists had elevated themselves to elite status—and excluded women from their ranks.

"The best thing in its line since Dava Sobel's Longitude. Bergland tells a great, if too little known, story of an intellectual woman in 19th-century New England. And it is beautifully told: I simply could not put it down. Anyone who cares about women's education in America should read this compelling and indispensable book."—Robert D. Richardson